'Wild' and 'Tracks' Explore Isolation

Reese Witherspoon in “Wild,” a new film directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (“Dallas Buyers Club”), based on a book by Cheryl Strayed. The story focuses on a solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail.

Anne Marie Fox / Fox Searchlight Pictures

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

August 27, 2014

LOS ANGELES — In the next two weeks, film festival viewers will join Reese Witherspoon on her long, lonely hike through the wilderness in the movie version of “Wild,”Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling book about a solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail. And that trip will mark the latest entry in an emerging subgenre among Hollywood dramas, the contemporary cinema of solitude.

Over the past several years, a small but insistent run of movies has explored the joys, challenges and healing power of something that is ever rarer in the digital age: human isolation.

“Wild,” which is expected to be featured at both the Telluride and Toronto film festivals before its commercial release by Fox Searchlight Pictures on Dec. 5, is only the latest instance. Based on a book that has sold about 1.6 million copies worldwide, it is directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, whose “Dallas Buyers Club” was nominated for a best picture Oscar in the last awards cycle, and written by Nick Hornby, whose script for “An Education” was nominated for an Academy Award in 2010.

On Sept. 19, the Weinstein Company will release John Curran’s “Tracks,” in which Mia Wasikowska plays Robyn Davidson, who in 1977 crossed 1,700 miles of Australian desert. For the most part, she was alone, except for the company of her dog and four camels. Perhaps no film figure has been quite as lonely this year as the director James Cameron, who dropped solo to the very bottom of the ocean in the documentary “Deepsea Challenge 3D.”

One of the bigger successes of last year’s awards season was Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity,” which won seven Oscars and took in about $716 million at the worldwide box office with its tale of an astronaut, played by Sandra Bullock, who spent most of the film in isolation, and in orbit. Among the disappointments was an Academy Awards snub for Robert Redford’s acclaimed performance in J. C. Chandor’s “All Is Lost,” about a lone sailor’s largely silent struggle with disaster at sea.

“We think of ourselves as being constrained by social noise today, but hasn’t this always been the case?” said Ms. Moore, who wrote by email from the Alaskan wilderness, where she described herself as being “not quite, but almost, alone.”

By at least some measures, the urge to disconnect from our perhaps excessive wiring is growing. “Absolutely, we’re seeing it year after year,” said Tanya Schevitz, a spokeswoman for the Reboot, which this year claimed 240 organizational supporters for its National Day of Unplugging, up from 50 in 2011.

Mia Wasikowska in “Tracks,” set in the Australian desert.

Matt Nettheim / Weinstein Company

Ms. Strayed, who spoke by telephone last week, noted that her own adventure occurred in 1995 (though her book was published in 2012), just before digital communication became ubiquitous. In the course of her 1,100-mile hike through California and Oregon, someone tried to explain email to her. “I don’t understand,” she recalls saying.

She also found the notion of carrying a cellphone absurd. “Who in their right mind would agree to walk around with a phone in their pocket?” she remembers asking an acquaintance who suggested that even hikers on the remote crest trail would soon be linked to those below.

Among contemporary readers, Ms. Strayed’s story — about using a lone journey to shake off a heroin habit, while coming to terms with family loss and her own marital infidelity — has found obvious resonance.

Mr. Hornby, the movie’s screenwriter, who said he is not a hiker, and hasn’t “spent any time off the grid, not even as research,” speculates that fans like himself were drawn to Ms. Strayed less by some call of the wild than by their easy identification with her essentially urban sensibilities.

“I suspect one of the reasons the book has done so enormously well is not because everyone is a secret hiker at heart, but because Cheryl is so recognizable to the kind of people who read books,” Mr. Hornby said in an email last week. “Certainly, I felt I knew who she was.”

In making the “Wild” film, Mr. Vallée faced the cinematic challenge that filmmakers of these types of movies all face: following a central character who has fled the sort of action, plot and dialogue and that drive most Hollywood fare. So he used plenty of flashback, and also made the most of chance human encounters on the trail.

“As a director, I wanted to put in what to me what was most emotional in the book, to bring it to the film,” Mr. Vallée said of his choices, speaking by telephone from New York.

Like Mr. Hornby, Mr. Vallée said he is not a hiker and is only sometimes disconnected from phone and email, though he does not crowd himself with social media. As for a deliberate wilderness hiatus, Mr. Vallée said that knowing Ms. Strayed and her story has piqued his interest.

“I’m curious to try it now,” he said.

David Thomson, a film historian, said he is not quite ready to declare the recent clutch of solitude-theme films to be a full-blown trend.

Still, he recognized the general impulse to escape the increasingly inescapable crowd, a human instinct that could have something to do with so many of these solitary pursuits winding up on screen. He noted this in an email sent from the wilder parts of Europe, near Mont Blanc, where he was watching climbers pursue “beauty and adventure and undeniable reality.”